A History of Video Games: The Rise of Gaming and The Crash

We know a little about the life and times of William Higinbotham, but what came next? “Tennis for Two” was a neat little novelty, but where could the medium go after that and how can it be monetized to bring this novelty to the mass market and into homes? Ralph Baer had an idea (that he claims had nothing to do with what was a “myth” at the time created by Willy Higinbotham, “Tennis for Two”) that he thought would make a great addition to any home.

Flash forward to 1972 and the invention of the first home video game console, the Magnavox Odyssey, by Ralph H. Baer and a team of engineers from Sanders Associates, a defense contractor from New Hampshire. Ralph Baer had an idea for a device that could be used to play games on a television and brought the idea to his two colleagues, Bill Harrison and Bill Rusch. Together they created seven different prototypes with the seventh being known as the “Brown Box”. The team met with Magnavox who decided to help them create and sell this invention. The most memorable game that came from this console was a game known as “Table Tennis” which directly inspired what is one of the most well-known video games around the world, Pong. Nolan Bushnell, considered with Ralph Baer to be one of the fathers of video games, was an engineer from California that had a dream to create the biggest video game company at the time. After playing “Table Tennis” on the Odyssey, he wanted to create an arcade version with his partner Al Alcorn and called it Pong. After the creation of Pong, the partners officially incorporated into a company who’s name was taken from the Japanese game Go and means “to hit a target” in Japanese, Atari. In 1975 they started to develop a revolutionary new console that could play four existing Atari games which would be known on release in 1979 as the Atari Video Computer System, or later called the Atari 2600.

Over the next four years the video game industry would explode. The market was flooded with consoles from Atari, Odyssey, Intellivision, ColecoVision, and Vectrex. Each console had its own games and were vying for dominance in the home market for gaming. This led to games coming out so quickly to try and make money that there was little to no oversight on quality. The massive influx of games and consoles with no quality control led to what most consider the worst game of all time, a movie tie-in game for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial that came out on the Atari 2600. Now, this game did not cause what happened next, but it was thought of as the example of why it happened. The Video Game Crash of 1983, also known as the Atari Shock in Japan. The gaming industry had crashed and no one knew where to go from there. Atari was one of the hardest hit companies and were left holding tons of games and consoles that were unsold, which led to about 728,000 cartridges being buried in the desert outside of Alamogordo, New Mexico.